The swamp exists

[Boris] Epshteyn, who has managed to stay joined at the hip with Donald Trump—much to the annoyance of other lawyers in Trump’s circle—seems to have gotten his hand caught in the cookie jar in recent weeks. He reportedly solicited large monthly retainers from people under consideration for administration positions in return for putting in a good word with Trump.

Among the victims of Epshteyn's scheme is Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, from whom Epshteyn allegedly requested $30,000 to $40,000 per month.

  Harry Litman

Per month???!!!

The Wall Street Journal reported a colorful scene in which Epshteyn went running after Bessent in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago before Bessent told him to back off.

Bessent declined Epshteyn’s offer and got the nod anyway.

Similarly, former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens reported feeling pressured by Epshteyn for substantial monthly payments in return for Epshteyn’s support.

Trump was reportedly furious.

Nobody makes grift besides him unless he gives the nod.

Trump ordered an investigation into Epshteyn’s activities by top transition lawyer David Warrington. The resulting report is apparently damning, and it recommends sharply limiting Boris’s access to the president-elect.

The bodies are already stacking up.

[T]here also have been reports of significant conflict between Epshteyn and Elon Musk, who reportedly accused Epshteyn of leaking information about cabinet picks.

[...]

The weeks since the election suggest that we’ll be seeing blatant norm-breaking and indifference to the law that makes the first Trump term seem like kid stuff.

[...]

[Epshteyn's] presence on [Trump's] legal team provoked the resignation of defense attorney Timothy Parlatore. Parlatore’s departing criticism of Epshteyn was scathing: “There are certain individuals that made defending the president much harder than it needed to be.” In Parlatore’s portrait, Epshteyn combined ruthless jockeying for proximity to Trump with conduct that actually harmed the case and sowed wide distrust among Trump’s lawyers.

Again, this is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s governing style.

[...]

Epshteyn illustrates a broader pattern that goes with the territory of working for Trump: a tendency to mimic their boss in using their position for self-enrichment. Epshteyn is the latest in a line of Trump advisors who have sought to exploit their proximity to Trump for personal financial gain, often through criminal activity. From Paul Manafort, who hoped to leverage his role as campaign chair to dig out of debt to Russian oligarchs, to Michael Flynn, who failed to disclose financial ties to foreign governments, to Steve Bannon, who skimmed over $1 million from contributions to his “We Build the Wall” scheme (Trump pardoned him shortly before leaving office), the pattern is unmistakable.

Epshteyn himself has been indicted in Arizona on charges of conspiracy, fraud, and forgery for his involvement in the fraudulent elector scheme.

[...]

To top it off, Epshteyn was arrested in 2021 on accusations of repeatedly groping two women at a nightclub. He received probation after pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, adding to the list of members of Trump’s circle—including Trump himself, of course—who have been accused of sexual misconduct.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Wheels of justice grinding slowly but surely

An Arizona grand jury has indicted 18 allies of Donald Trump for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election — including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorney Rudy Giuliani and former Trump campaign operative Mike Roman.

The indictment, which includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery, also describes Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator.

  Politico

So, indict the mfer.

“Defendants and unindicted coconspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters,” the 58-page indictment reads.

The names of seven of the defendants, including Meadows, Giuliani and Roman, are redacted, but the document makes clear who they are by describing their roles. Ken Chesebro, an attorney who helped devise Trump’s post-election strategy, is described as “unindicted coconspirator 4.

[...]

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has been helming the aggressive investigation. Though she initially appeared to be focused primarily on the false electors, in recent months she issued a wave of subpoenas to figures in Trump’s national orbit.

Mayes is the fifth prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the sprawling, multi-state bid by Trump and his allies to upend the 2020 results. Special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with federal crimes for those efforts. Prosecutors in Georgia have charged Trump and many of his allies for their bid to overturn the results in that state, including the fake electors plot. Prosecutors in Michigan and Nevada have also charged Republicans who posed as fake electors in those states.

UPDATE 04/25/2024:

Trump attended closing arguments

I didn't think he would.  But I didn't count on the publicity available if he stormed out.

As E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial against Donald Trump neared its final stage Friday morning in New York, proceedings quickly took a turn for the absurd with the judge threatening his lawyer with “lockup” and the ex-president leaving about 10 minutes into closings.

[...]

“This case is also about punishing Donald Trump for what he has done and for what he continues to do,” [Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta] Kaplan said, adding shortly thereafter: “This trial is about getting him to stop, once and for all.”

[...]

Trump’s abrupt departure came as [...] Kaplan, was delivering her closing argument – shortly after she noted that he had continued to defame the former Elle writer during this very trial. Trump left.

[...]

“Excuse me,” Judge Lewis Kaplan [no relation to Carroll's attorney] said. “The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”

[...]

Within less than 10 minutes ofTrump’s arrival to the courtroom, as both sides were discussing items they wanted to include in their closings before jurors entered, the judge threatened Trump’s lead attorney, Alina Habba, with punishment when she tried to interrupt him, saying: “You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup. Sit down!”

  Guardian

"The record will reflect that Mr. Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom," Kaplan declared.

[...]

The judge then instructed Trump's attorneys at the defense table — and his associates in the gallery — to remain seated. That included Trump's longtime advisor Boris Epshteyn, who appeared to be gearing up to leave before the judge singled him out and said the order also applied to him.

  The Messenger

Before closing arguments began on Friday, Habba arrived late to court and infuriated the judge by continuing to dispute a judge’s ruling long after he ruled.

"You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup," Kaplan warned just hours earlier. "Sit down."

  The Messenger

Pretty sure she's been goading him all along in an attempt to get a mistrial call.

Closing arguments as they happened.  (And jury verdict.)

And another thing...

In a closed-door interview on Monday with Bernard Kerik, investigators asked multiple questions about the Save America PAC’s enormous fundraising haul in the weeks between Election Day and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to Kerik’s lawyer, Tim Parlatore.

[...]

The special counsel has long been thought to be scrutinizing whether Trump or his PAC violated federal laws by raising money off claims of voter fraud they knew were false. Last week’s indictment of Trump, on charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not include any allegations of financial crime.

But the interview with Kerik, a longtime ally of Rudy Giuliani, shows that Smith’s team is still gathering information about how Trump and his allies handled the post-election period, and that investigators’ interest in Trump-related finances continues.

[...]

Months after Trump left office, Giuliani’s allies urged him to use Save America funds to pay Giuliani for his post-election legal work, according to The New York Times.

Parlatore said Smith’s team didn’t ask any questions about Jenna Ellis –– another lawyer who worked on Trump’s efforts to contest the election –– or about Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff in his final days as president.

  Politico

Rudy in the crosshairs here. (If Kerik's lawyer is to be believed anyway.)

The team did ask a few questions about Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer who worked with Trump after Election Day and who now works on his campaign and as his in-house counsel.

The person most people think at this point is co-conspirator #6 in United States v. Trump, and whose phone is now in the possession of the feds.

And the investigators asked multiple questions about Justin Clark, who was deputy campaign manager of Trump’s re-election bid, Parlatore added.

[...]

Kerik described to the special counsel’s team a contentious phone call where Giuliani yelled at Clark and called him a liar, Parlatore said.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Still digging

Was Epshteyn fired?

Rudy proferred, too, and I'm waiting for Trump to start badmouthing his old friend.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Getting to the bottom of it

If (when?) the DOJ indicts, they intend to have their case tightened down to within an inch of its life.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Par for the MAGA course - Part 2

Two former Trump advisers are promoting an anti-Biden cryptocurrency but experts are warning that it’s structured in a way that could substantially disadvantage those foolish enough to invest in it.

[...]

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spent a week listening to the absolutely bonkers content on [Steve] Bannon’s podcast, WAR ROOM PANDEMIC. Among Miller’s observations was that Bannon had “teamed up” with Boris Epshteyn to promote a new cryptocurrency called “$FJB” — short for “F*ck Joe Biden — that they were promoting to Trump supporters as a way to stick it to Biden somehow.

  Mediaite

Part 1 (earlier today) here.

And Bannon's already been charged and convicted (and pardoned by Trump) for ripping people off in a scheme over the border wall.

Not only does every purchase bolster the value of Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s holdings, crypto experts say the currency is designed in a way that affords its operators an usual amount of discretion in blocking owners of coins from selling their tokens—a power that could cause problems for investors…

[...]

De la Rouvier points out that this restriction doesn’t apply to the operators of $FJB. “They can transfer as much as they want, whenever,” he says. De la Rouvier outlines a possible scenario: If $FJB’s price started to drop, the coin’s operators could freeze some token holders from selling to prevent a further spiral, while the operators remain free to sell off their own coins.

[Mother Jones]

[Mother Jones] also noted that some $FJB holders had reported their holdings had already been placed under “arbitrary locks and unlocks,” and that all users have to pay an 8 percent fee to the $FJB operators with every purchase or sale of tokens.

[...]

Originally called the Let’s Go Brandon coin, each $FJB coin was valued at $0.0019 at launch, according to Coinbase. It hit a low of $0.000971 on Dec. 20, 2021, a high of $0.0046 after Bannon and Epshteyn started touting it, and then dropped back down to just above launch price at $0.0021 as of Jan. 18.

[...]

A source with knowledge of $FJB’s operations pushed back on the accusations in Mother Jones’ report that the coin was structured in a way that posed an unfair risk to investors, telling Mediaite, “The fee structure and lock only works with on chain transactions and do not apply to any trades made on centralized exchanges, which are the majority of the trading volume.”

This claim is refuted by one of the experts cited by Mother Jones, an engineer who reviewed the code used for $FJB, who said that a lock could “arbitrarily be placed on almost any address,” and also by de la Rouvier, who noted that the code empowered the coin’s operators to manually select individual users’ wallets and lock them

UPDATE 1/22:

Your assumptions are bearing out

Hours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January.

[...]

The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.

[...]

[A]s Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.

[...]

Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.

The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.

[...]

At [a] meeting, which was held in the Oval Office and attended by Trump, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, and his legal counsel, Greg Jacob, Eastman presented a memo that detailed how Pence could insert himself into the certification and delay the process.

The memo outlined several ways for Pence to commandeer his role at the joint session, including throwing the election to the House, or adjourning the session to give states time to send slates of electors for Trump on the basis of election fraud – Eastman’s preference.

[...]

But Pence resisted Trump’s entreaties, and told him in the Oval Office the next day that Trump should count him out of whatever plans he had to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session, because he did not intend to take part.

[...]

The then acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen, and his predecessor, Bill Barr, who had both been appointed by Trump, had already determined there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

[...]

On the calls, the former president first recounted what had transpired in the Oval Office meeting with Pence, informing Bannon and the lawyers at the Willard that his vice-president appeared ready to abandon him at the joint session in several hours’ time.

“He’s arrogant,” Trump, for instance, told Bannon of Pence.

[...]

The fallback that Trump and his lieutenants appeared to settle on was to cajole Republican members of Congress to raise enough objections so that even without Pence adjourning the joint session, the certification process would be delayed for states to send Trump slates.

[...]

The lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, Giuliani, appearing to follow that fallback plan, called at least one Republican senator later that same evening, asking him to help keep Congress adjourned and stall the joint session beyond 6 January.

In a voicemail recorded at about 7pm on 6 January, and reported by the Dispatch, Giuliani implored the Republican senator Tommy Tuberville to object to 10 states Biden won once Congress reconvened at 8pm, a process that would have concluded 15 hours later, close to 7 January.

[...]

The White House residence and its Yellow Oval Room – a Trump favorite – is significant since communications there, including from a desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.

But even if Trump called his lieutenants from the West Wing, the select committee may not be able to fully uncover the extent of his involvement in the events of 6 January, unless House investigators secure testimony from individuals with knowledge of the calls.

That difficulty arises since calls from the White House are not necessarily recorded, and call detail records that the select committee is suing to pry free from the National Archives over Trump’s objections about executive privilege, only show the destination of the calls.

[...]

The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that the panel was pursuing the Trump officials at the Willard to uncover “every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress”.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.